Coronavirus Newsletter 2020-07-25

Source: CDC

In today's newsletter: Introductions / Personal Update / Excess Death Tool / Conspiracy Entrenchers / Trump Update / Hotspots

Introductions
As of today, I'm moving my weekly coronavirus updates to here -- my writing blog, because I got tired of the Facebook interface and its boring lack of pictures, etc. But don't worry, Facebook followers ... I will still post a link on my wall to keep you informed.

For those of you following this blog -- you can see prior coronavirus newsletters with this Facebook search string I've put together.

Why do I do this? Because I'm concerned. I don't think the general public is sufficiently informed on all matters coronavirus, and I believe that if we all fully understood what was going on, we'd all know how to work together to fight this virus and end it for good.

I'm an actuary (associate), a modeler, a mathematician, a programmer, a logistician, a process improver, and a staunch follower of science. Part of my learning included how to handle medical related data, so even though I'm not an epidemiologist, I feel that I can offer a unique perspective on this outbreak, and explain things in a way that you may understand.

Personal Update
In earlier newsletters, I've mentioned that over the past month and a half I've been experiencing COVID-19 related symptoms off and on -- except no fever, and no loss of taste (though there is sometimes a funny taste). I got tested back in June and received a NEGATIVE result. And I got tested again last week at my doctor's request. After five days, I got back another NEGATIVE result. Both of these tests appear to be the same "emergency" or "quick" test and not the official FDA-approved test, though I'm not sure what the difference is.

I'm still frustrated because I don't know my current situation. I highly suspect I caught the virus in late May or early June, waited too long to get tested and had already fought the virus, and now may be fighting the remains ... randomly stored RNA fragments able to re-trigger symptoms.

Or it could a simple bronchitis infection. Either way, I'm having difficulty getting in to see a doctor, and I'm giving up because it's just not that bad. It's not worth the headache, and I'll revisit if I ever get a fever. Though, I do plan on getting an antibody test shortly.

I'm not happy about having to wait five days for the results this last time, and I hear some people are waiting for weeks for results. This tells me that we've reached our capacity of testing again, and as "actual" cases continue to rise, we won't see them in the official counts, because we can't keep up. And how can we effectively fight what we can't measure?

Excess Death Tool
I'm often asked: why do people care so much about COVID-19 deaths? Why don't people get upset with influenza deaths? Aren't these people dying from secondary conditions and not really from COVID-19? How can we trust the official numbers when hospitals are mis-categorizing unrelated deaths as COVID-19? Or how can we trust hospital counts when they have incentives to pad COVID-19 hospitalization/death counts?

For me, excess death statistics provide the answer to all these questions. Excess deaths = "Total actual deaths from all causes" minus "Total expected average deaths from all causes." What's nice about this metric is that it is very difficult to manipulate. It doesn't matter if a death is categorized as COVID-19 or as a heart-attack, because all deaths are the same. Then you can look at the big picture and ask "did a significant event occur at this time?"

In the graph at the top of this post, I've grabbed a screen shot from the CDC's US excess death tool for the City of New York. The blue bars show weekly total number of deaths from all causes for NYC for 2017 through today. The orange curve is an expected death threshold -- if the blue bars cross the orange line, deaths are noticeably higher than usual and an event is said to have occurred. These are marked with red plus signs above each breach of the threshold.

Note one breach happens the first month of 2018. This was a noticeably bad flu season for NYC -- and possibly some extra deaths due to a blizzard. It looks like a small bump, but it was enough to stress the hospital system.

And then look at 2020. Starting at the end of March, there is a very large breach -- a ridiculously high number of deaths not seen in NYC in decades. Not even the WTC attacks in 2001 had this many excess deaths. And the Swine Flu of 2009 showed practically no excess at all in NYC. (You can see 2001 and 2009 in the graph from this NY Times article.)

So, what can we say about the current COVID-19 pandemic? Is it "real"? Should we be concerned with so many deaths happening at the same time? Would it be good to continue trying to avoid further deaths?

I'll try to embed the tool here, but I'm not sure how successful it'll be on your device. Should it fail, just click on the picture at the very top of this post and it'll take you to the CDC Excess Death page. With this tool, you can select any state and a couple of selected cities, and see what kind of excess deaths have been happening. My home state of Georgia has a pretty sizable excess. My current state of North Carolina -- not so much. Utah -- hardly much at all except for the last couple of weeks. Arizona and Texas -- they were doing well except for the last month or two.

Conspiracy Entrenchers
Yet still, the conspiracies continue even today. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. Usually, I think these conspiracies are cute and easy to ignore, but unfortunately, this time it's leading many people to behave contrary to what needs to happen to eradicate the virus. This time believing the conspiracies is dangerous not only to the believers, but also everyone else ... not just the deaths, but also the destruction of jobs and the weakening of our economy.

More and more, I've witnessed many people, including friends, entrenching themselves in these dangerous beliefs. And over this past week or so, I've noticed an uptick of sincere pleas from these entrenchers, expressing a desire to be able to express their increasingly unpopular beliefs, to exercise their First Amendment rights, and to be respected instead of ridiculed. "Who is to say your science is better than my science?"

After a quick experiment, I was able to determine that these entrenchers' plea for respect seems to go only one way. They want respect for their ideas while maintaining the right to ridicule other people and their seemingly errant thoughts ... absolutely no attempt at all to try and understand opposing points of view.

And they all seem to agree on one thing: "I am never ever going to wear a mask." And so much anger. I'm sure you've seen videos of people attacking mask displays in the store and even other people wearing masks.

And I wonder ... how do people get like this? How can so many people turn against simple science and math, and simple strategies that have already helped several countries to nearly eradicate this virus?

I know a lot of it is Trump's fault and his lack of clear leadership ... sending mixed messages to the public, confusing even the knowledgable, and helping to create a perfect environment for conspiracy theories to thrive.

I also know that foreign actors are using our social media to feed us AI-generated posts scientifically engineered to maximize the division of our nation over this past decade. This is not just my own conspiracy theory, but rather a very well-documented development (of which I'll dedicate a post at a later time).

Also, ultra-conservative and ultra-liberal news sources have both contributed to this entrenchment, and I'm growing increasingly tired of watching all this intentional division.

We, the people, lose. I know a lot of these entrenchers personally, and they're all good people. I don't want to lose friends over this. As always, my goal is to get people to work together to fight this virus.

I've learned the hard way that shaming and pointing out logical errors is not the best way to convince these people to see the light ... rather, it seems to push them further into entrenchment.

When I'm diplomatic, my "contrary" friends and family react positively. They come to learn things from me, and I come to learn things from them (I've even included some of their ideas in these newsletters), and we all come out on the other end feeling more informed on the virus. I've watched several of these friends come to the point of: "Okay -- I'll put on a stupid mask, but I'm not going to like it."

But recently, I feel increasingly that we're running out of time and it's becoming more difficult to be diplomatic ... it feels so slow a process. Still, non-diplomatic solutions don't work -- so we must do our best not to shame others, and we should keep up the mutual respect, while not fearing to remind them to respect our ideas in return.

Trump Update
Which brings me to a very important message to my liberal friends. I know that Trump has been very disappointing in his leadership as per COVID-19. But back in April, he was really trying. After a couple of months of downplaying the epidemic, he helped to encourage lockdowns, and to help us through a most difficult time. But the liberal-leaning actors continued to ridicule Trump.

Right about the time Trump was ridiculed for suggesting using irradiation and injecting detergents to fight the virus, he stopped his daily briefings. He stopped talking to Fauci, and he went right back to downplaying the virus, and pushing for everything to open back up, which in hindsight was a disaster.

However, as of a couple of days ago, Trump has started his briefings again, and has told us we need to do the patriotic thing and put on our masks. Difficult times are coming again.

And please, please, please, please ... I beg of you ... we need to reinforce Trump when he's doing the right thing. We don't want Trump to revert to downplay mode, and if that happens, I'll guarantee you that his base will continue to refuse to wear masks, and deaths will continue to rise.

It's okay to pat Trump on the back and reinforce his good decisions ... then he'll see that he's finally doing a good job, and he'll continue ... and then perhaps his base will be convinced in time so that we can all finally get on the same page and fight this virus together.

If the Democrats can take the higher road, set aside politics, and work with Trump on this, I think we could have a chance at succeeding. If we instead wait four months for a hopeful changing of the guard, it could likely be too late to stop what's coming next.

Hotspots
And finally, to end ... I'd like to report that the New York Times has finally updated their hotspot map coloring scheme to now show the highest rates of new cases per capita, so now it's much easier to see where the bad spots are. And they appear to still be mainly in the South. Louisiana looks pretty bad now, and practically the whole coast of the Gulf. South Carolina is still pretty bad, and North Carolina has medium growth. California, Arizona, Idaho, Washington still look to have some strong hotspots going.

You can click the picture below to see the whole New York Times dashboard.

Thanks for reading ... and stay safe!

Flat Earthers and the Coronavirus

It's hard to believe that some people still believe in a flat Earth. There's even a Flat Earth Society where you can keep abreast of the newest developments.

It may sound crazy, but Flat Earthers provide several compelling arguments. According to Einstein, gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration. Imagine two different scenarios:

#1) Earth is a sphere large enough to have its own gravity. Someone standing on Earth's surface will feel a constant downward acceleration (what we call gravity). If you drop a ball, it will start falling slowly, but then quickly build up downward speed until it hits the ground.

#2) Earth is a flat surface, constantly accelerating upwards. If you're standing on this surface and drop a ball, it will first appear to hover over the ground, but then the upward accelerating ground beneath it will speed up and catch up to it.

In both situations, when you perform an experiment (dropping the ball), it looks exactly the same. So, how can you tell the difference? According to Einstein, you can't tell which is which just from the experiment itself.

So ... crap? Could Earth really be flat?

If you visit the FES site, you can get educated on how everything works ... they have an explanation for everything. From the picture above, you can see the flat Earth, with the North Pole in the center, and then the impenetrable ice shelves of the Antarctic at the border, helping to keep all the oceans' water from falling into the abyss below us.

Also note the sun floating above our world. This picture doesn't show it well, but the sun is like a lamp with a shade to help it shine down on different parts of the world depending on the time of day. The moon also orbits above our world ... in the current picture, its location would provide a full moon phase at night. As it moves to a different position in relation to the sun, you get all the other different phases.

They even have explanations as to why the sun sets ... it's an illusion due to the refraction of light as the lampshade starts turning away. Solar and lunar eclipses? There are complex explanations for those as well.

So how can we tell if Earth is really a sphere? Why should we believe the images that NASA provides to us? How do we know that they're not keeping us in the dark, and keeping us from the truth?

Hopefully I haven't convinced you that Flat Earth Theory (FET) is true, but I think it very important to demonstrate how much work people are putting into this, and how easy it is to justify it with the visage of science and math. In fact, I've tried myself to construct a flat-earth model that works consistently with our observations, just to see if it could be done. I still haven't quite managed it, though -- something always comes up to break it.

For example, if you look at the picture above, the "Southern Hemisphere" is stretched out much further than the inside "Northern Hemisphere." This would imply that planes flying in the Southern Hemisphere would take much longer to get to their destinations than planes in the Northern Hemisphere. This one issue by itself destroys FET and convinces me that our Earth is round.

But, one who is not so rehearsed on math, science, and correct principles, may easily be swayed by these intelligent-sounding arguments.

A famous rapper, BoB, tells us he's been in a plane high in the sky and didn't see any curvature, and he has recently tried to raise money to launch a satellite into space to prove it. Also, daredevil Mike Hughes started building rockets for the purpose of eventually launching himself into space high enough to see for himself if the world was flat. He ended up dying earlier this year in a failed rocket launch.

Enter the idea of "settled science," a term you've probably heard several times in the past few weeks. From a strict interpretation of the scientific method, it's nearly impossible to have "settled science," as science promotes the idea of skepticism. You start with what most people believe (a null hypothesis), you present a challenge -- an alternative theory (the alternative hypothesis), and then you perform tests to see which hypothesis wins.

Probably the most famous example of this is Newton's laws of motion and gravity, which made sense until Einstein came around to present his own laws, which did a much better job of explaining everything ... and it was revolutionary. Einstein's alternative theory won out. Newton's strongly held "settled science" theory was overthrown! (Sort of.)

Since we can't have 100% certainty on anything, we must settle for "settled science" to mean "we're 99.9% sure this is right." There's nothing wrong with challenging even the most stalwart theories, but in order to get things done, scientists and engineers need to accept what's close enough to reality for practical purposes. Thus, experts tend to hold to the stalwart theories and follow them until something better comes around.

Back to Flat Earth ... so what do you think? Is the Earth a sphere? Is it settled science? The number of people who believe FET is very small. Though, there are still some otherwise competent mathematicians and scientists trying to challenge the notion of Round Earth. We find it easy to laugh at these guys because it's just a very, very small following. We can all pat ourselves on the back because we know better.

Then, there's something called "Occam's Razor." It's the idea that if you have two competing theories to explain the same phenomenon, chances are, the most simplest explanation is the true one. When it comes to FET, I might be able to successfully create an isomorphism from Round Earth to Flat Earth Theory -- it would require a very complex set of equations and rules, such that it would be much easier to accept Round Earth Theory, as its equations are simpler, and it just "makes sense." This is the power of Occam's Razor.

In fact, everyone who does anything related to world travel uses Round Earth Theory. Planes tend to travel in Great Circles around the world, because that's proven to be the shortest distance (rather than a straight line). Satellites are placed in orbit around our planet using Round Earth Theory equations. Otherwise, our satellite TV wouldn't work, and neither would all of our GPS devices.

So, the Flat Earthers can believe what they want, but the people doing the navigating are all using Round Earth Theory -- without even giving it a second thought. Why should they care about competing FET ideas when Round Earth Theory works perfectly fine?

And finally, from the start of this post, you already know where I'm headed with all of this -- the recent pandemic.

When it comes down to it, pandemics are really simple math. The SIR Model explains the movement of a disease through a Susceptible population. As each person gets Infected, they will eventually Recover (or die), and eventually one of two scenarios play out: #1) the disease dies out, infecting only a portion of the population -- with some people reaching the Recover/Death stage, and the rest remaining indefinitely in the Susceptible stage. OR #2) the disease infects everyone until everyone reaches the Recover/Death stage.

This model along with other competing models rely on a set of underlying simple differential equations, and we have a long history of outbreaks to study, and fine tune our models.

The current coronavirus outbreak (SARS-CoV-2) is not unlike many of these other past outbreaks. In fact, some mathematicians have expressed wonder at how closely the spread of the disease matches popular epidemiology models. (Though, there are some local off-ages as this particular strain exhibits a "superspreader" nature -- where it seems to spread in chunks rather than in smooth patterns like the flu.)

From earlier, similar outbreaks, epidemiologists have determined what tactics and strategies work in combating viruses. In the case of respiratory diseases ... universal mask wearing works very well. We have not only seen this in earlier outbreaks, but we've even seen it already in the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Countries that are used to outbreaks put on their masks with hardly a second thought, and have already effectively eradicated the virus -- except for onesies/twosies coming mainly from foreigners. And countries who later adopt mask wearing enjoy a sudden drop in cases after a couple of weeks of consistent habits.

In a sense, this is all pretty much settled science. Or at least, prior to 2020, there had already existed plenty of experience to support these ideas. And much of what I know on outbreaks I had learned prior to 2020. You can't really learn basic modeling of data without having some exposure to exponential, S-curve, and other distributions that describe outbreaks. In fact, one of my textbooks was on how to truncate data effectively, geared more toward medical applications.

I suppose a little bit of inconsistent mishandling of the pandemic by the WHO and a lack of direct experience in the US has led to our current situation where most people don't seem to know how to behave in such a way to effectively fight the virus and eradicate it (as many other countries have already successfully done). And perhaps it's the whole idea of "free thought" in the US that has given credence to competing theories.

Unlike FET, where a very small people believe the very few skeptics, we have a situation where a very large number of people believe the very few skeptics ... and most frustratingly, it has become yet another highly charged politicized topic -- which has unfortunately led to too many unnecessary deaths.

To me, the solutions are very simple ... we could have eradicated this thing months ago, and avoided a nationwide shutdown. But we were lazy and we let it get out of hand. In April, our lockdowns helped us to get a handle on things -- numbers were going down, but then we thought it was safe to reopen everything, and we didn't do so safely. So (as what exactly happened in 1918-1920), cases in the US have blown up to levels not seen anywhere else in the world.

Instead of taking simple measures to win, we're flooded by crazy conspiracy theories ... the Democrats are trying to nuke Trump's reelection chances ... Bill Gates is trying to sneak in microchips in the upcoming vaccine ... masks are activating COVID that's been around for at least a decade ... hospitals are lying about the deaths and attributing them all to COVID, and so on.

There really is no difference between FET and these pandemic conspiracy theories, and I'm not sure what I can do about it. I can only watch in disbelief, and hope for the best. How can someone really ignore what is going on outside of our borders?

Despite the fact that these conspiracy theories are enjoyed by a large chunk of people, the theories are still worthy of ridicule and scorn. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to pull off on social media, because your friends are likely to take it personally. I always try to attack the ideas and not the people, but peeps today are very fragile. My goal is to help people understand so they can behave in such a way to help fight the virus ... together. But that's not how they take it.

Most people are being manipulated by forces intent on dividing our nation and to increase the spread of the virus -- encouraging "not settled science" as their battlecry, and "1st Amendment" / "freedoms" (without realizing that wearing masks is a means to enjoy more freedoms), and "you can't stop this virus -- no one can" (even though so many countries have demonstrably done so), and so much quoting of bad science studies.

I wish you all well, and be smart! Listen to the experts because they've been doing this for years. Ignorance can only kill, and intelligence is the only way to win. My hope is that if you can see the silliness of FET and understand how some people come to believe in it, then you may also be able to see the exact same things in COVID conspiracy theories today.